Uninstall LabVIEW FPGA

[DailyDose]

Every time I open up my LabVIEW it tells me FPGA has expired and can be activated and all that.  Yes, I know I can do temporary activation, but my development machine is short on space and if I recall correctly, FPGA eats up a lot of disk space.  I'm not using it, so I'd rather get rid of it.

So I go to NI Package Manager (which is what is brought up when you go through the control panel >> uninstall >> NI etc...) and I don't see it in there.  Is there a unique name for it?  Maybe it's not in there?  I tried to find it by looking for it in the products.  I figured if I had it, instead of giving me the option of installing it, it'd give me different options.  However, NI Package manager ONLY allows me to see/select NI FPGA 2019.  I apparently have 2018.  Which... NI, I highly recommend you allow us to choose the year we want when it comes to product.  That seems like an intentional oversight.

Anyways, any help here would be hot.

[Bob_Schor]

Well, NI Packages are becoming more "backward-compatible".  For example, I have LabVIEW 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 installed on my PC, but there is only one version (2019) of LabVIEW Real Time Module and of Vision Development Module.  It's a "feature", not a "bug".  However, I wouldn't assume that uninstalling, say, FPGA Module will eliminate only the FPGA module.

The Good News/Bad News is there is a Safe Way to fix things.  It's a fairly simple two-step process:

1. Uninstall all NI Software, including all Packages, Updates, everything that Package Manager shows you (except Package Manager, which it won't let you do).  Reboot, repeat, but you should now be able to uninstall Package Manager.  Reboot, and you may find some now-revealed NI Software, remove and reboot.
2. Reinstall your preferred version(s) of LabVIEW.  Do not install Drivers until all the versions of LabVIEW are installed.

Bob Schor

[DailyDose]

Oh good lord... I'll just re-activate the trial

[crossrulz]

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@DailyDose wrote:

but my development machine is short on space and if I recall correctly, FPGA eats up a lot of disk space.  I'm not using it, so I'd rather get rid of it.

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It is the FPGA compilers (Xilinx ISE and/or Vivado) that use up a lot of space.  Just the FPGA module on its own is not that much.  So if you are looking to just open disk space, you can uninstall those.  Admittedly, I have not done that recently since NIPM come about.  But with the old installers, I safely uninstalled just the compilers without messing up everything else.